Ooh not "immediate" withdrawal. It'll be fast enough for most of us.
at what point... if any, are we going to take military action?
Oh yeah, that's a terrible threat there. "There may or may not exist a point where we would want to use military action to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons". Wow, so hostile there, compared to Bush's peace offerings.
Considering that he has also been heavily criticized for saying he would speak directly with Iran's President, i.e. use diplomacy, this 'threat' seems pretty irrelevant.
is recent vote for allocating $165 billion for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan (including $51 billion dollars for veterans' education) tell me that he, like any other corporate-funded Democrat, have no principled objection to war or to these wars in particular.
Funding a war in progress -- and in particular caring for our people damaged by this war -- is completely different from not objecting to it. Guess what? It'll cost money to get our troops out of Iraq too, so when he proposes a spending bill that includes this money, don't lump that in with "supporting the war".
Democrats deserve no slack, and should be given none.
I don't hold the actions of Nixon or Reagan against Bush Jr; I see no reason to hold the actions of JFK against Obama. Because that makes no sense.
Democratic voters are voting with their hearts and not their heads. From having watched many presidential elections from more of a neutral stance, I can say that to really win, you need to win the votes from both parties, not just your own. Sure, you can win by a narrow margin, but that is hardly marks the beginning of change. Change begins with the populace changing their attitudes. Leaving race out of the issue, how many republicans do you think would vote for someone named Barack Hussein Obama. A name that rings with the sounds of two recent so called enemies.
So, just to make sure I understand you, you're saying Democrats are voting with their hearts and not their heads because they aren't considering how Republicans are going to vote with their heart and not their head?
And what's your head-based strategy for overcoming this problem that Republicans may automatically dislike the Democratic candidate? To nominate Hillary?! Oh yeah, that'd get the Republican's crossing over in droves. *eyeroll*
We know there's going to be a lot of people who automatically won't like Obama because of his name and yes his race. We think those people are a minority, and we think the set of those people and the set of people who would switch sides in any case don't intersect to a great degree. In other words, losing them because they won't vote for someone with the middle name "Hussein" is no big loss.
Were they just going through thousands of tons of ancient ice core and happened upon it by accident?
No, that would be ridiculous.
They probably just studied this one ice core that they had, and found bacteria in it. Which would imply that the ice is simply stuffed with bacteria, so it really wasn't much of an accident at all. Which is hardly surprising, since in our modern world it is nearly impossible to find a surface that isn't replete with bacteria.
Well that certainly is convenient. I wonder why the bible has so many specific dates if its not literal. Anyways if you read any book that was filled with non-literal stories why would you believe any of it. Thats the exact same as trusting a known liar. If creation is just a metaphor then so is god, jesus and everything else in the bible. Either believe it all or none of it. I hate pick and choose believers. Too cowardly to abandon an ancient book yet too sensible to believe it.
Yeah, after all, why would you want to spend the time trying to understand the meaning, when you can just make a binary "all myth" or "all fact" choice that completely ignores all the nuance? I mean, it's not like the text itself could possibly contain any hints as to which is which! It's a-priori all or nothing!
I hate people who try to tell others how they should believe in a religion that they themselves don't even believe in or understand. Guess what? You don't get to decide what someone believes. You don't get to call something "picking and choosing" just because you don't grasp the concept that somebody read the book and understood parts of it to be allegory, parts of it literal. You don't get to decide that it is impossible for something to contain both the literal and the figurative, in this case because that's idiotic.
I'm sure i'll get modded down for bashing the religious folk. Before you do, re-read it and pretend i was talking about a religion you don't like such as satanism or.... wicca.
Okay. Stop telling Wiccans what is a valid way to view and practice their religion, you ignorant bigot.
Thats free as in "free society". You're free to do as you wish, except to deny others the freedoms you yourself were granted.
That's pretty damn free. Only sociopaths think that's not free, because a sociopath only thinks about what they get. A sociopath feels like they are repressed by not being able to own slaves.
BSD is free as in anarchy. It's a great license, but like anarchy itself, it doesn't stop someone from setting up their own fiefdom.
Right. You won't be running power lines made of ceramics (because of the temperature requirement too) but it's no problem for a fixed installation like a supercomputer.
Dragonlance ruined gnomes in D&D, ultimately leading to their exclusion from playable races in 4th edition. Hopefully, their new role as "monsters" will remove the notion of "all gnomes are tinker gnomes" and we can see them returned in 5th edition.
Er, I guess it ruined them if you forgot that worlds other than Dragonlance existed... And I was a super Dragonlance fanboy, and played lots of Dragonlance campaigns, and I never forgot that a gnome in Forgotten Realms wasn't a tinker...
What they're missing is that the point of vision, and perception in general, isn't to give us information about the rays of light that hit the retina. What vision does is give us information about the objects in our environment, which reflect or emit rays of light. The reason we see the two squares as having different colors, despite the fact that our retinas are getting the exact same pointwise stimulus from them, is because the visual system, using contextual information about light and shadow across the whole scene, can figure out that the surface spectral reflectivity of the two squares must be different. Square B looks lighter than square A because the visual system judges, correctly, that it must reflect more light. Or put alternatively: the visual system figures out that if the two squares were in the same light, the point stimulus from the reflected light rays would be different.
Uh-huh, but that's not what the scene depicts, nor is it the basis of the illusion.
There's two types of color we're talking about here. There's the surface property of the objects if viewed in equal light, like the color of paint that was used to paint the squares or its reflectivity. Then there's the appearance of the object based on its current actual lighting conditions. I'll call these "absolute" and "shadowed" for want of better terms, hoping you'll understand.
There is absolutely no problem with our eyes perceiving both somethings absolute color and its shaded color. If you saw two objects of the same absolute shade, but one was in shadow, you would easily be able to see both that the objects were the same absolute color, while also perceiving the one in shadow to be darker.
Just because our eyes/brain make deductions about the properties of a surface based on the lighting, does not mean it actually throws the lighting information away afterwards. We see shadows as darker. We can compare both the absolute color of two things and the shadowed appearance of the two things.
The point of this illusion is not just that B appears "lighter", as in the deduction that B is a light-painted square and A is a dark-painted square. That's obvious, and not the illusion. The illusion is that the shaded appearance of B is such that it is still much brighter than A.
And it is an illusion. In fact, it's just a twist on the usual contrast illusion where a medium gray shade appears very light on a black background, and dark on a white background. The fact that the transition from light to shadow is broken up by the darker squares is what causes the illusion.
One way to show this is to modify the image. Remove the dark squares around B, replacing them with light squares. Keep the shadow intact. It then becomes obvious that: 1) B is still an "absolute" lighter color than A, i.e. if they were in the same light, B would be lighter than A. The very thing you say your brain is deducing and causing you to perceive B as a lighter "shaded" color as well. 2) B's relative "shaded" color is about the same as A. I.e. the shadow darkens B to the point where it appears about equal to A. The very thing you say your brain doesn't perceive in order to tell you the more important (1).
So, you proposed that in the original image you did not perceive (2) because your brain was really after telling you (1). That is in part true, but the reality is that your brain can tell you both things... Were it not for the optical illusion which misleads you.
How does an company like Microsoft "learn" to become more "transparent"?
Same way you make your own life transparent when guests come over: By hiding everything you don't want anyone to see in your bedroom closet, sweeping all the dust under the rug, and pretending like your largely empty but tidy living room where the guests are allowed is always that way.
I think so, but when it whispers in your ear "Would you like to become one with me?" realize that it is talking in a much more literal sense than what you may have been expecting.
You're talking about process variation, versus deliberately formulating a completely different mix for a completely different purpose.
Your point is trivial and irrelevant to the post you replied to. Which would be alright for what it is, but using the "Newsflash:" cliche to make that irrelevant point just makes you look like a douche.
Top Gear is such an awesome show. I just watched the 747 one, very cool.
Another bad-ass Top Gear episode, which is also on topic, was where they tried to turn a car into a 3-stage reusable rocket modelled after the shuttle. This is just the launch part, not the whole episode. Spoiler alert: End with awesome explosion.:)
It's surely a bad analogy but I see resemblance between bugs in democracy (politicians avoid dealing with looming problems [budget deficit,etc] to achieve short-term goals [reeelction]) and bugs in the human psyche (if it feels good, do it again.. and again.. and again.. even if long-term consequences are massively negative).
Well the fundamental problem is that those consequences are in the future, and the future is by its very nature hypothetical, and any future consequences are also thus hypothetical, and thus also possibly non-existent. It's a hedge of the immediate known reward vs a future potential but perhaps not guaranteed cost.
Besides, sometimes the gamble pays off. After all, here I am over a decade into adulthood, and I have yet to sprout so much as a single hair follicle on my palm. So in at least that case, my psyche's "if it feels good, do it again and again" impulse didn't steer me wrong!
My first thought upon reading the summary here was "Man, I really hope they disabled the sprinkler system...
Yeah, no kidding. That little caveat there about water making things worse is kinda an understatement too. More like "Water can actually make things kaboom". Or, at least if you're watching from a safe distance, it would also be accurate to say "Water can actually make things awesome."
Just enough to add a nice extra expense to your ticket that will scale with fuel costs.
2. If it detects a terrorist attack, what can anyone do about it while the plane is in the air?
KABOOM!
Well, that's if I was in charge. And it'd have nothing to do with whether terrorists were attacking. On the plus side, I wouldn't lie and say it's about terrorists; I'd be perfectly up front with saying it was just for fun.
Are you sure? I'd bet quite a few helicopters have flown over you in the past. How can you be sure that one of them wasn't being flown by an Amazon tribe?
It doesn't seem like a very bright idea to use an existing religion - in the middle east no less - and fantasize a conflict with it and another religion.
Wait, you mean so there's no conflict between light and dark within the religion itself, so they're going to have to put it in conflict with a different religion?
Lame! What is it, like Zen Buddhism or something?
Cool religions have built in good/evil conflicts. Boring ones tell you that conflict and desire are the source of suffering and only by letting go will you- *snore*
Is it just me, or do some of those "tribesmen" look like they're wearing colonial Spanish armour? Looks like pictures taken from a movie set or as a joke to me.
No, I think it's just you, it doesn't look like Spanish armor at all. Just because you're wearing a hat that's rather tall in the middle and slopes down on either side doesn't make you a Conquistador.
The US military destroyed the Iraqi army in less than a week. This is a fact. The botched occupation was not a military plan, but a civilian leadership fiasco. The Bush administration had some twisted day dream that the rest of the world would donate troops and supply to bring democracy to Iraq, and the Bush administration was dead wrong, hence the catastrophe in Iraq. Its not a lack of military power, but a lack of political resolve. I guess you fail to see that, but since I'm talking truths and your playing to anti US sentiment, you'll get modded +5 insightful, and I'll get modded troll/flamebait.
It took more than a week, it took over two weeks before the fall of Baghdad, which wasn't the end of the conventional phase of the conflict. However the only reason it took so long is because Sec Def Donald Rumsfeld almost fucked it up. He's a civilian, so that fits in with what you're saying. The military itself did a damn nice job, especially considering they had an ignoramus in charge who thought he could create a "legacy" by tearing up the Army logistics manual and inventing a kind of American Blitzkrieg which has never been our style, and his version of it was stupid anyway and made our supply lines vulnerable so we had to slow down and regroup.
On that note, saying that the major failing of the civilian leaders was that they underestimated how much our allies would help doesn't sit well with me. As if it was really these other countries' lack of support that caused the catastrophe. No, not at all. It was the complete and utter lack of a plan for the post-invasion that caused the catastrophe. Adding more troops into the mix would not have helped, without any plan via which they were to create and maintain peace. The twisted day dream they were dreaming was that Iraqis would love us unconditionally, and that Iraq would turn into Iowa by magic and democracy would spring from the ground, and thus they didn't need to do anything other than kick Saddam's ass. They were such insular narcissistic idiots, that any of their underlings who suggested that a plan would be helpful were told to stuff it. Even when the insurgency was gaining momentum they were stubbornly refusing to deal with it. That was their major failing.
In the end I agree that it was not in any way a lack of military power (or really any competency of our military), and perhaps a lack of political resolve describes why Rumsfeld et. al. would not commit to the occupation. But the buck on this Iraq fiasco stops at the civilian leaders of our country, not any other.
think in terms like "drummers" it's necessary to be better than the other band members.
Oh, I agree man. I didn't want to start a fight or anything. Getting your ask kicked by a drummer sucks, you know? It's not just the pain and humiliation. It's that you never know when the next blow is going to come.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly not immediate withdrawal from Iraq
... if any, are we going to take military action?
Ooh not "immediate" withdrawal. It'll be fast enough for most of us.
at what point
Oh yeah, that's a terrible threat there. "There may or may not exist a point where we would want to use military action to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons". Wow, so hostile there, compared to Bush's peace offerings.
Considering that he has also been heavily criticized for saying he would speak directly with Iran's President, i.e. use diplomacy, this 'threat' seems pretty irrelevant.
is recent vote for allocating $165 billion for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan (including $51 billion dollars for veterans' education) tell me that he, like any other corporate-funded Democrat, have no principled objection to war or to these wars in particular.
Funding a war in progress -- and in particular caring for our people damaged by this war -- is completely different from not objecting to it. Guess what? It'll cost money to get our troops out of Iraq too, so when he proposes a spending bill that includes this money, don't lump that in with "supporting the war".
Democrats deserve no slack, and should be given none.
I don't hold the actions of Nixon or Reagan against Bush Jr; I see no reason to hold the actions of JFK against Obama. Because that makes no sense.
Democratic voters are voting with their hearts and not their heads. From having watched many presidential elections from more of a neutral stance, I can say that to really win, you need to win the votes from both parties, not just your own. Sure, you can win by a narrow margin, but that is hardly marks the beginning of change. Change begins with the populace changing their attitudes. Leaving race out of the issue, how many republicans do you think would vote for someone named Barack Hussein Obama. A name that rings with the sounds of two recent so called enemies.
So, just to make sure I understand you, you're saying Democrats are voting with their hearts and not their heads because they aren't considering how Republicans are going to vote with their heart and not their head?
And what's your head-based strategy for overcoming this problem that Republicans may automatically dislike the Democratic candidate? To nominate Hillary?! Oh yeah, that'd get the Republican's crossing over in droves. *eyeroll*
We know there's going to be a lot of people who automatically won't like Obama because of his name and yes his race. We think those people are a minority, and we think the set of those people and the set of people who would switch sides in any case don't intersect to a great degree. In other words, losing them because they won't vote for someone with the middle name "Hussein" is no big loss.
Were they just going through thousands of tons of ancient ice core and happened upon it by accident?
No, that would be ridiculous.
They probably just studied this one ice core that they had, and found bacteria in it. Which would imply that the ice is simply stuffed with bacteria, so it really wasn't much of an accident at all. Which is hardly surprising, since in our modern world it is nearly impossible to find a surface that isn't replete with bacteria.
Well that certainly is convenient. I wonder why the bible has so many specific dates if its not literal. Anyways if you read any book that was filled with non-literal stories why would you believe any of it. Thats the exact same as trusting a known liar. If creation is just a metaphor then so is god, jesus and everything else in the bible. Either believe it all or none of it. I hate pick and choose believers. Too cowardly to abandon an ancient book yet too sensible to believe it.
.... wicca.
Yeah, after all, why would you want to spend the time trying to understand the meaning, when you can just make a binary "all myth" or "all fact" choice that completely ignores all the nuance? I mean, it's not like the text itself could possibly contain any hints as to which is which! It's a-priori all or nothing!
I hate people who try to tell others how they should believe in a religion that they themselves don't even believe in or understand. Guess what? You don't get to decide what someone believes. You don't get to call something "picking and choosing" just because you don't grasp the concept that somebody read the book and understood parts of it to be allegory, parts of it literal. You don't get to decide that it is impossible for something to contain both the literal and the figurative, in this case because that's idiotic.
I'm sure i'll get modded down for bashing the religious folk. Before you do, re-read it and pretend i was talking about a religion you don't like such as satanism or
Okay. Stop telling Wiccans what is a valid way to view and practice their religion, you ignorant bigot.
Thats free as in "free society". You're free to do as you wish, except to deny others the freedoms you yourself were granted.
That's pretty damn free. Only sociopaths think that's not free, because a sociopath only thinks about what they get. A sociopath feels like they are repressed by not being able to own slaves.
BSD is free as in anarchy. It's a great license, but like anarchy itself, it doesn't stop someone from setting up their own fiefdom.
Right. You won't be running power lines made of ceramics (because of the temperature requirement too) but it's no problem for a fixed installation like a supercomputer.
Dragonlance ruined gnomes in D&D, ultimately leading to their exclusion from playable races in 4th edition. Hopefully, their new role as "monsters" will remove the notion of "all gnomes are tinker gnomes" and we can see them returned in 5th edition.
Er, I guess it ruined them if you forgot that worlds other than Dragonlance existed... And I was a super Dragonlance fanboy, and played lots of Dragonlance campaigns, and I never forgot that a gnome in Forgotten Realms wasn't a tinker...
What they're missing is that the point of vision, and perception in general, isn't to give us information about the rays of light that hit the retina. What vision does is give us information about the objects in our environment, which reflect or emit rays of light. The reason we see the two squares as having different colors, despite the fact that our retinas are getting the exact same pointwise stimulus from them, is because the visual system, using contextual information about light and shadow across the whole scene, can figure out that the surface spectral reflectivity of the two squares must be different. Square B looks lighter than square A because the visual system judges, correctly, that it must reflect more light. Or put alternatively: the visual system figures out that if the two squares were in the same light, the point stimulus from the reflected light rays would be different.
Uh-huh, but that's not what the scene depicts, nor is it the basis of the illusion.
There's two types of color we're talking about here. There's the surface property of the objects if viewed in equal light, like the color of paint that was used to paint the squares or its reflectivity. Then there's the appearance of the object based on its current actual lighting conditions. I'll call these "absolute" and "shadowed" for want of better terms, hoping you'll understand.
There is absolutely no problem with our eyes perceiving both somethings absolute color and its shaded color. If you saw two objects of the same absolute shade, but one was in shadow, you would easily be able to see both that the objects were the same absolute color, while also perceiving the one in shadow to be darker.
Just because our eyes/brain make deductions about the properties of a surface based on the lighting, does not mean it actually throws the lighting information away afterwards. We see shadows as darker. We can compare both the absolute color of two things and the shadowed appearance of the two things.
The point of this illusion is not just that B appears "lighter", as in the deduction that B is a light-painted square and A is a dark-painted square. That's obvious, and not the illusion. The illusion is that the shaded appearance of B is such that it is still much brighter than A.
And it is an illusion. In fact, it's just a twist on the usual contrast illusion where a medium gray shade appears very light on a black background, and dark on a white background. The fact that the transition from light to shadow is broken up by the darker squares is what causes the illusion.
One way to show this is to modify the image. Remove the dark squares around B, replacing them with light squares. Keep the shadow intact. It then becomes obvious that:
1) B is still an "absolute" lighter color than A, i.e. if they were in the same light, B would be lighter than A. The very thing you say your brain is deducing and causing you to perceive B as a lighter "shaded" color as well.
2) B's relative "shaded" color is about the same as A. I.e. the shadow darkens B to the point where it appears about equal to A. The very thing you say your brain doesn't perceive in order to tell you the more important (1).
So, you proposed that in the original image you did not perceive (2) because your brain was really after telling you (1). That is in part true, but the reality is that your brain can tell you both things... Were it not for the optical illusion which misleads you.
How does an company like Microsoft "learn" to become more "transparent"?
Same way you make your own life transparent when guests come over: By hiding everything you don't want anyone to see in your bedroom closet, sweeping all the dust under the rug, and pretending like your largely empty but tidy living room where the guests are allowed is always that way.
Now, mod me up damnit.
Doesn't seem likely, since you replied to the wrong post! (GP understood Amouth's point just fine, GGP did not).
I wonder if it puts out on the first date..
I think so, but when it whispers in your ear "Would you like to become one with me?" realize that it is talking in a much more literal sense than what you may have been expecting.
You're talking about process variation, versus deliberately formulating a completely different mix for a completely different purpose.
Your point is trivial and irrelevant to the post you replied to. Which would be alright for what it is, but using the "Newsflash:" cliche to make that irrelevant point just makes you look like a douche.
...but the plural of "medium" is "media", not "mediums".
;)
That depends entirely on the type of medium you're talking about.
Top Gear is such an awesome show. I just watched the 747 one, very cool.
:)
Another bad-ass Top Gear episode, which is also on topic, was where they tried to turn a car into a 3-stage reusable rocket modelled after the shuttle. This is just the launch part, not the whole episode. Spoiler alert: End with awesome explosion.
It's surely a bad analogy but I see resemblance between bugs in democracy (politicians avoid dealing with looming problems [budget deficit,etc] to achieve short-term goals [reeelction]) and bugs in the human psyche (if it feels good, do it again.. and again.. and again.. even if long-term consequences are massively negative).
Well the fundamental problem is that those consequences are in the future, and the future is by its very nature hypothetical, and any future consequences are also thus hypothetical, and thus also possibly non-existent. It's a hedge of the immediate known reward vs a future potential but perhaps not guaranteed cost.
Besides, sometimes the gamble pays off. After all, here I am over a decade into adulthood, and I have yet to sprout so much as a single hair follicle on my palm. So in at least that case, my psyche's "if it feels good, do it again and again" impulse didn't steer me wrong!
My first thought upon reading the summary here was "Man, I really hope they disabled the sprinkler system...
Yeah, no kidding. That little caveat there about water making things worse is kinda an understatement too. More like "Water can actually make things kaboom". Or, at least if you're watching from a safe distance, it would also be accurate to say "Water can actually make things awesome."
Wake up! It's definitely definite that maybe it's ice!
1. How much does all of this equipment weigh?
Just enough to add a nice extra expense to your ticket that will scale with fuel costs.
2. If it detects a terrorist attack, what can anyone do about it while the plane is in the air?
KABOOM!
Well, that's if I was in charge. And it'd have nothing to do with whether terrorists were attacking. On the plus side, I wouldn't lie and say it's about terrorists; I'd be perfectly up front with saying it was just for fun.
Are you sure? I'd bet quite a few helicopters have flown over you in the past. How can you be sure that one of them wasn't being flown by an Amazon tribe?
Of course, that turned out to be terrible advice, but it was non-obvious.
:)
Ha! Amazing the subtle difference between "obvious advice" and "obviously bad advice".
It doesn't seem like a very bright idea to use an existing religion - in the middle east no less - and fantasize a conflict with it and another religion.
Wait, you mean so there's no conflict between light and dark within the religion itself, so they're going to have to put it in conflict with a different religion?
Lame! What is it, like Zen Buddhism or something?
Cool religions have built in good/evil conflicts. Boring ones tell you that conflict and desire are the source of suffering and only by letting go will you- *snore*
I want some of that old-time religion!
an entrenched spearmen unit that's been there since 3800 B.C.
Wow, and I thought those Japanese soldiers on tiny atols in the pacific who'd been there for twenty years still fighting WWII was bad...
Is it just me, or do some of those "tribesmen" look like they're wearing colonial Spanish armour? Looks like pictures taken from a movie set or as a joke to me.
No, I think it's just you, it doesn't look like Spanish armor at all. Just because you're wearing a hat that's rather tall in the middle and slopes down on either side doesn't make you a Conquistador.
The US military destroyed the Iraqi army in less than a week. This is a fact. The botched occupation was not a military plan, but a civilian leadership fiasco. The Bush administration had some twisted day dream that the rest of the world would donate troops and supply to bring democracy to Iraq, and the Bush administration was dead wrong, hence the catastrophe in Iraq. Its not a lack of military power, but a lack of political resolve. I guess you fail to see that, but since I'm talking truths and your playing to anti US sentiment, you'll get modded +5 insightful, and I'll get modded troll/flamebait.
It took more than a week, it took over two weeks before the fall of Baghdad, which wasn't the end of the conventional phase of the conflict. However the only reason it took so long is because Sec Def Donald Rumsfeld almost fucked it up. He's a civilian, so that fits in with what you're saying. The military itself did a damn nice job, especially considering they had an ignoramus in charge who thought he could create a "legacy" by tearing up the Army logistics manual and inventing a kind of American Blitzkrieg which has never been our style, and his version of it was stupid anyway and made our supply lines vulnerable so we had to slow down and regroup.
On that note, saying that the major failing of the civilian leaders was that they underestimated how much our allies would help doesn't sit well with me. As if it was really these other countries' lack of support that caused the catastrophe. No, not at all. It was the complete and utter lack of a plan for the post-invasion that caused the catastrophe. Adding more troops into the mix would not have helped, without any plan via which they were to create and maintain peace. The twisted day dream they were dreaming was that Iraqis would love us unconditionally, and that Iraq would turn into Iowa by magic and democracy would spring from the ground, and thus they didn't need to do anything other than kick Saddam's ass. They were such insular narcissistic idiots, that any of their underlings who suggested that a plan would be helpful were told to stuff it. Even when the insurgency was gaining momentum they were stubbornly refusing to deal with it. That was their major failing.
In the end I agree that it was not in any way a lack of military power (or really any competency of our military), and perhaps a lack of political resolve describes why Rumsfeld et. al. would not commit to the occupation. But the buck on this Iraq fiasco stops at the civilian leaders of our country, not any other.
think in terms like "drummers" it's necessary to be better than the other band members.
;)
Oh, I agree man. I didn't want to start a fight or anything. Getting your ask kicked by a drummer sucks, you know? It's not just the pain and humiliation. It's that you never know when the next blow is going to come.
Yeah, I got a million of em.